licensing programming languages and tool chains is the oldest software business model, but it has changed a lot because of free software today you have a few o

licensing programming languages and tool chains is the oldest software business model, but it has changed a lot because of free software today you have a few options: a) a variant of freemium, where a commercial arm will sell/license commercial components as part of the ecosystem. see Zend and ActiveState as examples b) setting up a foundation with donations c) being sponsored by a commercial entity to work on the language (see jQuery, Python, Erlang) If you are going to start a company around a programming language, you would want to find a niche for it and market it there rather than trying to be everything to everyone. for eg. is this for web applications, embedded systems, etc. Come up with a list of your 'ideal users' (or customers) and pitch them.